Eye micro-surgery typically requires surgeons to perform high accuracy operations targeting micro blood vessels with characteristic dimensions ranging from about 10-400 μm in diameter. These operations may involve, for example, retinal peeling, separation of crossing blood vessels (sheethothamy), blood vessel cannulation, and drug delivery.
Minimally invasive surgery of the eye is typically constrained to four degrees-of-freedom (DoF) motion through a fixed fulcrum point in the sclera. For example, surgeons are currently limited to using straight rigid needles that have no dexterity at their tip. This lack of dexterity can be a drawback in many types of eye surgery, such as those mentioned above.
Due to the dimensions of the blood vessels and veins involved in eye micro surgery, surgeons are required to operate with high accuracy while maintaining a fixed point of entry through the sclera. Thus, accuracy and tremor reduction are currently major limiting factors in eye micro-surgery.
Lack of force feedback is another limiting factor in eye micro-surgery. For example, the amount of force required to poke through the retina is very small (on the order of one milli-newton). Therefore, in manual operations, surgeons have to maintain a training schedule to maintain their ability, for example, to deliver drugs to the retina without poking through the choroids.
In view of the foregoing, there exists a need in the art for a system and method for macro-micro distal dexterity enhancement in micro-surgery of the eye.